origin

Provides information about the human brain and the differences between modern human beings, Neanderthal relatives, and modern-day chimpanzees.

Explores the life of Jesus and the movement he started, challenging familiar assumptions and conventional notions about the origins of Christianity. Drawing upon new and sometimes controversial historical evidence and interviews with the nation's leading New Testament scholars, the series transports the viewer back two thousand years to the time and place where Jesus once lived and preached. Traces Jesus' life, focusing on the events that occurred after he died and on his first followers.

Attempts to trace human origins and travels to every continent in search of the people whose DNA holds humanity's secret history.

Was life triggered by some event, like lightning hitting a pond full of amino acids? Earth was teeming with life billions of years before the dinosaurs existed. Single-celled organisms inundated the oceans, and the soil swarmed with living creatures. Where did it all come from and how did it go from a single-celled organism to a trillion-celled organism like Man? Cutting-edge science is testing out answers about life's origins and how life can be created on new worlds, even this one.

"For thousands of years, before the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the Europeans, the vast American landscape was home to millions of Native Americans, whose ancestors still remain on the land today. They formed a wide variety of regional cultures, dotting the unspoiled environs stretching from the stark, red rock formations of the Southwest to the thick forestlands of the Northeast. . . . readers will examine how each Indian culture group adapted to their unique surroundings and turned nature into home, as they built their houses, hunted for food, raised their children, and worshiped their gods"--Amazon.

This book explores Islam, as a faith and as a political power, which rose to world dominance in an astoundingly brief timespan--little more than one hundred years. From the events of Muhammad's life to the founding of a vast empire, the rise of Islam is the story of a people, a vibrant culture, and the growth of a civilization.

The theory of evolution takes hold-transforming ideas about survival, extinction, and life itself. Can species change? Or go extinct? In the eighteenth century, most people answer no to both questions. But in the century that follows, that certainty gets challenged as some people in Europe question the common belief that all creatures are the same as they've been since life's creation.

"The notion of a living world is one of humanity's oldest beliefs. Though scorned by scientists in the sixties and seventies, the facts supporting this concept have now become tenets of modern Earth system science, a relatively young field that studies the living and nonliving components of the planet as an integrated whole. Life did not evolve passively in response to its environment, as scientists have long assumed. Instead, it evolved with Earth, shaping its climate and terrain at every scale, one part in a great orchestra, in which non-living elements-the air, rocks, and water-are the instruments that life, in its multitudes, has emerged to play"--Provided by publisher.

A Harvard geologist presents a narrative chronicle of the Earth's 4.6-billion-year evolution that places the environmental crises of today's world in a context that explains the planet's fragile capacity to support life.

"Scientists spend a lot of time trying to learn about the earliest Americans, but much remains unknown. Who were they? When, how, and from where did they enter the land? What is their relationship to modern Native Americans? Anthropologists develop theories to answer these questions based on the evidence they discover. Their theories--and the discoveries that prove and disprove them--are highlighted in this informative volume. Readers will feel like anthropologists and archaeologists themselves as they study photographs and read about bones and artifacts and what they reveal about the ancient cultures that roamed America many thousands of years ago"--Provided by publisher.